At this point Niall paused, having decided to tactfully omit the last lines of the story. But Cheb was obviously aware that there was more to come, and his manner made it clear that he was still waiting. Niall suppressed his embarrassment and went on: “When you heard what had happened, you had all the prisoners executed, including the old chief and his wife. And the mystery of the white tower remained unsolved.” This time, Niall’s manner made it clear that the story had come to an end. Yet the spiders remained silent for a long time. Finally, Cheb made a gesture that was amazingly like a human being shaking his head. Then he said: “You speak with the tongue of a sheevad.”
“A sheevad?” It was the first time Niall had heard the expression.
Asmak explained: “A sheevad is one who speaks words of wisdom, like the Lord Dravig.”
Niall was flattered but puzzled; as far as he could see, there was nothing particularly wise about his story. Then something about the attitude of the young spider brought a glimmer of understanding. He had been listening with the absorption of a child listening to a fairy tale. Niall was suddenly struck by the realization that the art of storytelling must be totally new to the spiders. When they “spoke” to one another, they did so in images which transmitted their meaning instantaneously. This meant, in turn, that there could be no “suspense”; the whole story, with its beginning and end, was transmitted in a single flash of information. When Cheb spoke of wisdom, he meant something more like “mind control,” the ability to unfold an ordered sequence of images. It was startling to realize that human language, for all its inbuilt limitations, struck the spiders, in some respects, as superior to their own method of communication.
Since Cheb was apparently absorbed in his own reflections, Niall cleared his throat and asked: “Is the story true?”
“True?” The Spider Lord seemed taken aback by the question. “Did Prince Hallat really exist?”
“A human being called Hallat certainly existed. But he was not a prince. He was a slave — my slave.”
“And did he teach you to understand the human soul?”
“No. But he taught me to understand human language.”
“And how did that come about?”
In asking such questions, Niall did not attempt to formulate them in words. For example, in asking if Hallat existed, he merely transmitted an image of Hallat with a general sense of interrogation. To ask how this came about, it was merely necessary to transmit a kind of question mark. Compared with spoken words, the method was pleasingly economical.
Unfortunately, Cheb’s answer, couched in the same mode, was equally economical; it came as a bewildering explosion of information that outran Niall’s powers of understanding, and left him feeling breathless. Cheb perceived his bewilderment, and in the spider mode — which he obviously preferred to human language — transmitted the message: “I am sorry. Let me try again.”
His second attempt was less precipitate. The first image was of a bare, bleak landscape covered in snow, the next of spiders crouching in caves or ruined houses to escape the icy wind. These images were accompanied by a kind of background information — like the background of a picture — which Niall could either pay attention to or merely absorb as a part of the general effect.
Translated into human language, Cheb was saying, in effect: “When I was born, the world was suffering from a great ice age. Millions of my people died before they had reached adulthood. The snow fell day and night, and the wind changed continually so that shelter was almost impossible to find. The sky was always dark, and for a period of many years, no one saw the sun.”
All this made it clear that Cheb was speaking of the period immediately after the Earth had been brushed by the tail of the comet Opik. Niall had learned of “the great winter” during his history lessons in the white tower. In the twenty-second century of the modern era, the Earth had been threatened with destruction by a radioactive comet, and most of the human race had left in giant space transports, to undertake the nine-year voyage — at half the speed of light — to a planet in the star system Alpha Centauri. The settlers christened this planet New Earth.
In fact, the head of the comet missed the Earth by more than a million miles. But material from its tail fell into the Earth’s atmosphere, destroying nine-tenths of all animal life. And its gravitational field caused a perturbation in the moon’s orbit, which in turn caused a violent outbreak of volcanic activity on Earth. The atmosphere turned into a kind of fog which formed an impenetrable barrier against the sunlight. The planet entered a new ice age, which continued until the dust particles slowly fell back to earth. Two centuries after the disaster, the ice fields began to retreat, as other climatic factors transformed the surface from a refrigerator into a hothouse.
The comet which had brought destruction also brought a new form of life. It originated on the planet Alpha-Lyrae 3, the third in the solar system of the blue star called Vega, in the constellation Lyra, twenty-seven light years away. On this planet, the force of gravity was so immense — a hundred times greater than that of Earth — that a man on its surface would have weighed ten tons and been unable to lift his eyelids. Under these conditions, the only intelligent life form to develop consisted of giant globular creatures, which on Earth would have been called vegetables.
A hundred and fifty million years ago, a fragment from an exploding galaxy passed through the Vega system, causing a catastrophic upheaval on Alpha-Lyrae 3, and tearing loose a segment almost as large as the Earth. This material was dragged through space in the wake of the star fragment until, many millions of years later, it came into near-collision with the comet Opik — whose head was fifty thousand miles in diameter — and was captured in its tail. This is how the seeds of the vegetable life form of the planet Alpha-Lyrae 3 came to land on Earth.
Some fell in deserts or polar regions and perished. Only five succeeded in germinating, and one of these was in the tropical region of the Great Delta. Because Earth’s gravity was so much lower than that of their own planet, their molecular processes were accelerated, and they became immense — the plant in the Great Delta, half-buried in the earth, looked like a small mountain.
These giant plants possessed highly developed powers of telepathy; on their own planet, evolution was a communal effort. On Earth, their evolution soon came to a halt because a mere five superbeings could not build up sufficient thought-pressure. There was only one solution: for the plants to create more superbeings by accelerating the evolution of other species. The plants became giant transmitters of vital energy, causing the energy to flow through the Earth itself. All creatures who could receive the vibrations began to evolve at an accelerated rate. Unfortunately, most animals on Earth — including man — had already evolved too far to be able to receive these vibrations. Insects, on the other hand, seemed highly receptive to these waves of pure vitality, and many species quickly developed into giants. But certain types of spiders were the most receptive of all; this is how they quickly replaced man as the most dominant species on Earth. Aware that they owed their life to the energy transmitted by the giant plant of the Delta — men called it the empress plant — they worshiped it as the great goddess. It was because Niall had spoken with the goddess face to face that the spiders now revered him as a kind of god.
The Mighty Cheb must have been among the earliest of the giant spiders; this is why he was so much smaller than his modern descendants.
Now Niall asked the question that had always puzzled him, even as a child. “But why did the spiders become the enemies of men, instead of their friends and allies?”
Cheb answered: “It was not our choice. During the great winter, many of our people were forced to share habitations with men. When they found us, they killed us. We would have been glad to live in peace. But long before I was born, men and spiders had been bitter enemies.”
And now, transmitting his images more slowly, Cheb told a story of murder and cruelty that made Niall feel slightly sick. During Cheb’s lifetime, the spiders were already increasing in size and intelligence at an astonishing rate. Oddly enough, many human beings regarded them with respect, believing that it was unlucky to kill a spider unnecessarily. But the steady increase in size was noted with alarm. With the exception of a few rare species — such as the black widow — few spiders secreted a venom that could kill human beings, and the venom of the large and hairy tarantula — the species to which Cheb belonged — was too weak to kill even a cat or dog. It was unfortunate, therefore, that during the great winter, the bite of a hairy tarantula was responsible for the death of a sick child, and that the child’s brother, a youth named Ivar, thereafter killed every spider he came upon. In due course, Ivar became a great leader, known among his own people as Ivar the Strong, but to others as Ivar the Cruel. It was Ivar who conquered most of his neighbors in the country of the two rivers, and who seized its largest city and massacred its inhabitants. This city he renamed Korsh — meaning stronghold — and he and his descendants built its great walls and towers with slave labor.